CALL FOR PAPERS
JAGNES is currently open to submissions on any subject
related to ancient or modern Near Eastern studies. Submissions (articles or
book reviews) must be written and submitted by graduate students, from any
university, domestic or abroad.
Please email us at jagnes@berkeley.edu for more information.
CURRENT ISSUE
Volume 14, 2020
Hard Times: Critical Approaches to Crisis and its Aftermath
Editorial Letter
Editorial Letter
A letter from our Editors-in-Chief about the Volume and its contents.
Interviews
Hard Times: Critical Approaches to Crisis and its Aftermath: Interview
Editors-in-chief, Brooke Norton and Lubna Safi sat down with fellow NES graduate student AriaFani to speak with our JAGNES 2019 Spring Lecture speaker, Mohammad Rafi about hisresearch, pedagogy, free speech, critical theory and more.
Articles
I Have a Story, Too: Suicide Bombers, Borders, & Peripheral Narratives
Rachel Winter’s contribution to this issue, “I Have a Story, Too: Suicide Bombers,Borders, & Peripheral Narratives” counterposes the narratives of suicide bombings constructedby the news media to those offered by the artists she examines. Winter diviersifies thisperspective further by looking into representations of female suicide bombers, and the differentgendered narratives that motivate thesir represntation in the media. She offers the archetypes thatpackage these suicide bombers, inflecting the Jungian archetypes with the mythical bent of the“Femle Monster” and “Woman Warrior.” What comes under scrutiny is not merely therepresentation of the suicide bomber by the artowrk, but also its framing. Winter asks, “What isthe viewer to make of the title, “Snow White”?” The fairytale is the framework around which thesuicide bomber can be made familiar to the audience and Winter’s paper puts pressure on thedesire to repackage the suicide bomber’s experience through a Western framework.1
Homebound travelers: the return's destabilization of homeland in Arabic literature
In his contribution, “Homebound Travelers: The Return's Destabilization of Homeland inArabic literature,” Shawheen Rezaei sheds light on the shattered perspective of “the return.” Inhis reading of the riḥ la Rezaei focuses on the way it disorients the traveler — both the characterand the reader. Rezaei’s article suggests that we consider how our perspective as readers issimilarly complicated in our reading of this genre. In the novels he examines, the question of thetraveler’s encounter with the other is nuanced both by the other that the traveler encountersabroad and the other that he encounters once he returns home. When the traveler returns as anoutsider, we are forced to question whether there can really be a return. Ultimately in askingwhat it means to return, the works that Rezaei readsforce us to consider if any return is possible.